1. Technical Field
The present invention is generally directed to network computing systems. More specifically, the present invention is directed to providing policies that govern transactions between two or more network computer systems. Even more specifically, the present invention is directed to an apparatus and method for creating an interface by which conversation policies can be constructed for agents in a network computing system.
2. Description of Related Art
In interactions between humans and an electronic business system or between two applications in an enterprise application system, participants, whether programs in the systems or humans, interact by sending messages to each other. These interactions can be brief, such as a simple query and answer, or they can be extended, such as in the negotiation of a sale of products or services, where significant information, offers, and counter-offers can be exchanged. U.S. Patent Application 20030204405, published Oct. 30, 2003, which is owned by the assignee of the current application and is hereby incorporated by reference, discloses a means for providing modular conversation policies. This provides a structure in which policies can be brought in from an outside source and modified to meet a specific business system.
As the use of such conversational policies becomes more common, it becomes increasingly desirable to be able to write new policies and to modify old policies. The policies are currently created in a form of extensible markup language (XML), a language that uses tags. However, the rigid structure of an XML tree does not lend itself to error-free coding. A different manner of writing policies is needed.